This week as I reworked some galleries on my site, I ran across the Holga photo below. I immediately recognized that I had photographed the same truck at the same annual car show this past September. I guess I have a thing for flames.
2018 – Rolleiflex
2011 – Holga
I recently dusted off my Holga and shot a few rolls of 120 for the first time in years. As much as I love Instagram, it was nice to shoot without the instant gratification. My goal is to shoot more with my Holga this summer to force myself to be less reliant on the screen on the back of my digital SLRs. I feel like I often get into a rut where I’m shooting, shooting, shooting and not really seeing or thinking. That’s the great thing about the Holga: it forces me back to basics.
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Being that it was my third year photographing Notre Dame’s Blue-Gold spring football game, I decided to dust off my Holga and try something a bit different.
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I shot this portrait using a Holga … sort of. It would be more accurate to say I used a Holga lens mounted on a Canon EOS-1D X. I bought the lens a long time ago, but have only played around with it a few times. On my day off, I finally unboxed some new lighting equipment and decided to try to make a Holga portrait (a Holgrait?) of my girlfriend using an AlienBee B800 flash and 47″ octabox. It was tough seeing Babs because the modeling light was burned out so I ended up with this outtake that ended up being one of those happy accidents.
I photographed a local WWII re-enactment back in June on a Lake Michigan beach. Primarily I shot using two DSLRs, but I managed to sneak in a few frames here and there using my Holga. Originally I had planned to use my Rolleiflex, but alas it remains a $220 paperweight on my bookshelf after a camera strap failure lead to its early demise during a May trip to Chicago.
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Couple weeks back, I shot a bit of Indiana University’s Little 500 Miss-N-Out cycling races while I was in town visiting friends from college. Although I shot a lot of stuff on my “normal” cameras, I also exposed three rolls on my Holga. With a couple days off from the daily grind, I finally got around to processing and scanning the negatives.
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Until this week, I had been procrastinating processing and scanning a couple rolls of 120 film. Part of this stemmed from the fact that I hadn’t really touched my Holgas since September. Recently, I picked them back up and started to shoot with them again. I did this in an attempt to once again get inspired and excited about photography in general. I love shooting with my Holgas as a way to decompress and rethink how I look at things visually. The result of my return from Holga hiatus was developing and scanning the rolls. To my surprise, one roll was shot in September during a vacation to Indiana and Nashville, Tennessee while I was working in Wyoming.
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Since moving back to South Bend, I’ve made a couple trips up to Silver Beach in St. Joseph, Mich. This was thanks in part to the unseasonably warm weather we’ve had. Also, the town is one of my favorite places on earth.
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A few weeks back, I photographed Hell on Wheels, a shooting competition where participants from around the world dress in Old West costumes and fire weapons from the Old West. Given the period costumes, I couldn’t resist firing off a couple rolls on my Holga.
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I’ve gotten to the point where I carry two Holgas with me everyday to work: one loaded with 100 ASA film and one loaded with 400 ASA film. The results are negatives full of random, in-between moments from my daily newspaper assignments. Here is the latest edition on what is slowly becoming a regular feature on my blog.
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